Long after the billboards come down, the campaign mailers rest in landfills and the New Year’s toasts come and go, 2014 may be remembered as Richmond’s big election year. We are honored to have been in Richmond’s streets and chambers, its homes and schools and everywhere else, helping write the first drafts of history in an important time and place. Chevron…

Working the graveyard shift that September night, Officer Wallace Jensen pulled his police cruiser over on Stege Avenue and parked out of sight of Uncle Sam’s Liquors. He’d heard reports that locals hung around Uncle Sam’s drinking after dark. His lieutenant had asked him to pass by and disburse crowds. Jensen left his car around…

Things were looking up for Rusamie Ashly Phongphoumy, who had long dreamed of a better life. On the night of Nov. 29, her boyfriend proposed to her. She accepted. The couple made plans for the future. But all that ended the next day, when she was killed in a West Oakland market, allegedly by a…

Frazier, a Richmond High School student and basketball player, was killed last Friday in a drive-by shooting outside his family’s home in North Richmond. As the outpouring of grief showed, Frazier’s death touched the community deeply. It also came as part of a streak of gun violence in the city.

Rodney Allen Frazier loved motorbikes. He rode his favorite dirt bike home Friday night. He parked outside of the metal gate beside the curb. His aunt left the porch light on for him. It was well before his 10 p.m. curfew.

Joseph Newkirk recalls seeing the weathered face of Ized Stewart often along Barrett Avenue. Known to some as George, and known to others in the Richmond community as “the bag man,” Stewart was a fixture in the neighborhood. Stewart had a distinctive look. He wore layers of tattered clothes. He had a scraggly beard and…

A crowd gathered in mourning on a street corner in Richmond on Wednesday evening to honor the life of Dimarea Young, a 19-year-old man who was shot and killed on this block the day before. Friends and neighbors, pastors and politicians, police officers and violence disrupters stood side by side, heads bowed. “We place him…

Until his death, Lincoln Plair would show up each morning at 8 a.m. at the Elm Playlot in the Iron Triangle to pluck broken glass, syringes and other dangerous debris from the sandbox where local kids play. Then he’d leave his daily mark: a series of geometric patterns in the sand, “like a little Zen…

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Richmond Confidential is an online news service produced by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism for, and about, the people of Richmond, California. Our goal is to produce professional and engaging journalism that is useful for the citizens of the city.